Why Is Chipotle Now Working With the CIA-Funded Palantir?
In brief
- Chipotle is piloting a Palantir-built "Food Safety Risk Management Platform"
- The platform will score restaurants using health inspections, pest incidents, and employee illness reports.
- Palantir was seeded in 2005 by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital arm, and still draws nearly half its revenue from government work, including ICE's deportation-tracking ImmigrationOS system.
Chipotle wants a computer to flag which burrito line might make you sick next. The company it hired to build that computer is Palantir, the data firm that got its start with cash from the CIA.
Wired reported yesterday Chipotle is piloting a "Food Safety Risk Management Platform" built on Foundry, Palantir's core software. Foundry works like a giant filing cabinet that pulls scattered data into one dashboard, so a company (or an army) can see everything at once. Chipotle confirmed the project.
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The platform reportedly runs on three ingredients: health department inspection scores, pest sightings, and employee illness reports. Blend those together and every restaurant gets a risk score, a digital report card nobody outside headquarters gets to see.
Chipotle's chief corporate affairs and food safety officer, Laurie Schalow, told Wired the company is "piloting a new Food Safety Risk Management Platform designed to provide a more consistent and centralized view of food safety risk across our restaurants." She did not say when it will launch, if any consumer data is exploited, how many stores use it, or whether customers will ever see a store's score.
Now for the part that might make you want to put down your burrito. Palantir isn't just another Silicon Valley data vendor. Co-founded in 2003 by Peter Thiel, the company landed its first major check in 2005 from , the CIA's own venture capital arm, created specifically to fund startups useful to American spies. The CIA became one of Palantir's first customers.
